


take root among the stars

by tristesses



Category: Splendor & Misery - clipping. (Album)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Isolation, Literary References & Allusions, Musical References, Other, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 15:59:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8584711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: Interludes in dead space.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evocates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/gifts).



**i. carry the burden**

“Give me some beats,” he says, and the Computer replies in its clipped, mechanical voice, “Please specify.”

“Beats. Music.” He drums on the console in imitation, beatboxes a little. “Actually, wait, record that.”

“Affirmative. Recording now.”

A few seconds of drumming and beatboxing, enough to loop, and he tells the Computer to stop recording.

“Recording saved. The crew kept their music on personal devices unconnected to the network. I do not have access to it, 2331.”

“Don’t call me that,” he snaps, and tries to process the idea of living without music. The Computer doesn’t seem bothered by it. He find it more alien than actual extraterrestrials.

“What should I call you?”

He reaches for his name and can’t find it. Wracks his brain and can’t find it. Did they take it from him or did he just forget?

“I don’t care,” he says finally, deciding to worry about that later. “But call me by a name, okay? I’m a fucking human being, not _cargo_.”

The Computer, to his surprise, doesn’t point out that he was cargo from its point of view quite recently. Instead, it stays silent.

And stays silent.

And stays silent.

Day after day after goddamn day, all silent. Sometimes he’s not sure if it’s better or worse than insults. Most of the time, he knows he’d rather have the quiet.

Or lack of quiet, because he does his damn best to keep the silence from sinking too far into his brain. He writes a symphony on the exposed pipes of the ship, drags a gun muzzle across them to hear them sing. Bangs ‘em with the butt of the gun to hear them clang. Opens and shuts airlocks, slams doors, plays with the static on the radio channels. He goes to the shooting range and tests out all the weapons, from the traditional laser guns to old-fashioned revolvers to new and shiny plasma weapons. _Pyong, bang, boom, pzhew._ And at his request, the Computer records it all.

He’s got his beats now.

 

 

**ii: slow blood**

_Oya stands before him, tall, rangy, and dark. Wide smile on her face. No spacesuit, though she’s standing on the crunchy yellow rock of an exoplanet. He knows intuitively that she doesn’t need a spacesuit anymore; she’s moved past that. She holds her hand out to him, beseeches him to take it._

“ _I want to show you something,” she says._

“ _Is this more spiritual bullshit?” he wants to know. She laughs, and grabs his hand from where it hangs, tentatively outstretched in the air._

“ _Everything and everyone is spiritual bullshit, baby,” she says, and leads him straight ahead. “Even you.”_

_He barks a laugh, nearly scornful but not quite; this is Oya, for godssake. “Yeah right.”_

“ _Look down.”_

_He does. There’s a sprout pushing through the ochre dirt, fresh green against the dead world. Oya kneels by it and cups it tenderly between her hands, like it’s a precious thing._

“ _I thought you didn’t approve of terraforming,” he says, and this time she laughs._

“ _You’re getting me confused with someone else,” she says. “All those people in your mind. Who will you talk to next?”_

“ _What do you mean?” he asks, confused, and she just smiles at him._

“ _In order to rise from its own ashes,” she says, “a phoenix first must burn.”_

_And suddenly she’s serious, brown eyes like graveyard dirt._

“ _It’s time to wake up,” she tells him, and—_

“Stasis cycle complete,” the Computer tells him in its tranquil voice.

He wakes up. He vomits out the fluid of the stasis tank on the floor, retching and hacking, and drags himself to the mess hall. He walks the ship like a dead man, eyes unseeing. He screams into the bowels of the ship and hears his own cries answer.

The Computer’s log is mostly indecipherable, all information relevant to machines, not people, but the dates are the only thing he cares about anyway. It has been 2.24726e+10 seconds—seven hundred-some years—since he started the stasis cycle. His third, he thinks. He loses track of things like that, numbers, time, all of it meaningless between FTL jumps and centuries in stasis. They say too many jumps erode a computer’s memory. What about _human_ memory?

He goes back to the stasis tank. Injects the sedative. Tells the Computer to jump. The Computer says, “Stasis cycle initiated.”

_Torres hands him a wrench and closes his unresisting fingers around it. Wasn’t he just with Oya? No, it was Amy. Wasn’t it?_

“ _You need to stop thinking,” Torres tells him. She frowns, as if his overactive brain is somehow at fault. “Feel the machine. Let your intuition guide you. You know how it works, you know how to fix it.”_

“ _I got all the machine fixing experience I need in the uranium mines,” he says back. (The yellow planet, of course. Oya had been there, her suit had malfunctioned. She’d died of radiation poisoning, her flesh sloughing off her bones like meat simmering in the pot. No green plants grew over her corpse.) “I’m pretty good already.”_

“ _You could be better.” Torres wags a finger in his face. “Don’t talk back! Can’t you see we’re trying to help?”_

“ _Help me with what?”_

_Torres takes him by the shoulders, shakes him a little. She’s smaller than he is, planetborn, raised in high-g, but much stronger._

“ _You can’t stay like this forever,” she tells him. “Change is inevitable.”_

_Yeah, well, watch me, he wants to say—_

“Stasis cycle completed.” Then the Computer adds, over the sound of his usual retching, “It has been approximately 382 years since stasis was initiated.”

Huh.

“That’s new,” he says to it when he’s finished. His voice is hoarse; it’s been a while since he’s used it for anything but screaming. “The year thing.”

“I have observed you querying the date when you exit stasis,” the Computer says. “I thought it would be more efficient to tell you now. Should I stop?”

“Nah,” he says. “Definitely not. Thanks.”

The first time the Computer has spoken to him of its own accord, and it thinks he wants it to shut up? It must not know how fucking good it is to hear a new voice around here.

But after that burst of talkativeness, the Computer goes back to its customary silence. He makes up for it, rapping to himself and pacing the corridors for hours. 382 years and nothing’s changed. He wishes he could remember his stasis dreams; he’d like to see another person for once, even if it’s just in his head.

Back to the stasis tank. This time, he asks the Computer to wake him mid-cycle. He’s developed a need, a _thirst_ , to remember his dreams, remember who he is besides an anonymous life-form traveling in a tin can through dead space. Avoiding that slow spin-down at the end of a stasis cycle might shake the hidden memories from his brain.

“Interrupting stasis without following protocol could lead to severe brain damage,” the Computer informs him. It almost sounds disapproving, but he knows the AI isn’t sophisticated enough for something like that.

“Who cares?” he demands. “The corpses in the hold? My family, you know, the dead ones? _You?_ ”

Silence. Absolute silence. The sound of the vacuum of space sucking across the hull is almost audible. Then the Computer says, “I’ll require an override to make changes to the stasis cycle.”

He gives the override. Climbs into the tank. Injects the sedative, as usual.

“Jump,” he commands. “Anywhere away from inhabited space.”

“Affirmative. Stasis cycle initiated,” the Computer says. Reproachfully? Can’t be.

He lays down in the stasis tank and the fluid trickles in from all sides, coating him in viscous liquid, levels rising until they reach his mouth—this is always the worst part—he opens his lips and breathes in and chokes as the fluid fills his lungs. It takes on the effort of respirating for his body, allowing him to drop into near-death. The sedative kicks in, taking him one step further toward that other world, and the Computer says,

“I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

 

 

**iii. the specter in the spectrum**

There are rituals a man must do in order to remain sane in a situation like this one, floating in a tin can out here in the black. Here is one: he showers and washes one body part at a time, bottom to top: left foot, right foot, left leg, right leg, all the way to his scalp, when he soaps up his springy hair then soaks it with the conditioner he found while scavenging the crew quarters for supplies. Then he prays before rinsing the soap off and watching it circle the drain, down to the bowels of the ship to be recycled.

Another ritual: he prays before eating (prayer again; Oya would be so proud). Sometimes it’s the prayers from his childhood—

“Give us this our daily bread,” he murmurs before nibbling on the nutrient cubes he eats when he’s too low to force himself to cook.

—Or reciting the names of the saints and prophets of the past, Cindi and Lauren and John. Are they watching, are they listening? Does it matter?

—Or chanting the stories of the old gods they were forbidden to know about.

“Enefa poisoned Bumba’s food once just to see what he would do,” he raps, and sounds rise from the speakers without his bidding. The hollow clash of the gun barrels against pipes, his feet stomping, the hum of the background radiation of the universe swallowing the beat. He stops short, and so does the sound.

“Computer,” he says, and falls silent. The Computer has cut off all output to the speakers, as if startled by his reaction. Or embarrassed. Is he reading too much into the silence?

“Computer,” he tries again. “Can you keep doing that? I liked it.”

“Yes,” the Computer says, and is that warmth in its voice? Could there be emotion hiding in its wiring? It cues up the beat, and he closes his eyes, takes in the rhythm. Without his conscious thought, his body starts swaying.

“Just to see what he would do,” he picks up, and his voice merges fluidly into the beat as they carry on the story together, he and the Computer.

He doesn’t go into stasis for a long time after that.

**. . .**

“I need to show you something,” the Computer says to him one day, after one of its long bouts of quiet. Its tone is abrupt, almost urgent. “Will you see?”

“Sure, I’ll see,” he says, startled out of his reverie. Sitting in the viewing bubble, looking at black space, no stars in sight, thinking about his stasis dreams again. It’s been so long since he went under that he’s beginning to forget them. “What is it?”

“Come to the console,” it tells him, and he winds his way through the corridors from the viewing bubble to the bridge. Goes to the console, looks at the screen. Binary is scrolling across the screen, an orderly chaos of zeros and ones he can’t read. He starts to tell the Computer this, but it cuts him off.

“Listen,” it says, and oh, he does. His voice, syllables clipped and phonemes isolated, sounds layered upon sounds and blended together until something new and beautiful is born from old pain. His voice, but a rap only the Computer could have written, thoughts expressed in tech jargon he would have to research to fully understand. He thinks it’s about him. He thinks it’s a love song.

“My Captain,” it says, and its volume is lower than he’s ever heard it. “This is for you.”

He presses his hand to the console, palm against warm metal, and rests his forehead on the bulkhead. He can hear it humming, hear the Computer’s heartbeat low and syncopated with its raps. Tears drip down his cheeks as the music washes over him. His voice, new words. New life, for both of them.

 

 

**iv. ride or die**

Time passes. He closes his eyes and lies down in the stasis tank, and opens them again. One night of sleep, or a millennium in suspended animation. He’s not sure it matters anymore. The Computer has stopped telling him the date, and he’s stopped asking; he thinks it resents his bouts of stasis, as if he’s supposed to stay awake for years to entertain it. He asks it once, frustrated beyond belief, what exactly it expects him to do with his time.

“Spend it however you want,” the Computer says coolly. “You only have so much time left.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” he snaps, and stalks off to the viewing bubble. The Computer watches him, monitoring his vitals, as always. He can feel its gaze on his back, under his skin, reading every heartbeat and endorphin spike _._

“Can I get some goddamn privacy?” he yells at the bulkheads. A pregnant pause, then the lights dim and the quiet hum that follows him everywhere dies off. He can’t slam the airlock door, but he wishes he could.

At first he revels in the silence. The irony bites at him, given his situation, but in a way, privacy has become a luxury on this ship, with his omnipresent companion that never sleeps. He appreciates the Computer’s willingness to afford him this, and hates that he thinks about it like that. Like a transaction. Give or take, a favor for a favor; that’s the way he grew up, but not the way he wants to die.

And die he will; he doesn’t need the Computer to tell him that. Age digs its brittle claws into everyone eventually, no matter how many sessions in stasis he has. There are grey threads in his hair and his beard; his body is strong, but the skin around his eyes is starting to crease. He wonders how long he has left. He could ask the Computer, but he’s not sure it wants to know, either.

(Next time he goes into stasis, will he wake up?)

So this is how he lives: he eats, he sleeps, he conducts his little rituals. The silence has now begun to grate; he speaks to himself, laughs at his own jokes, raps when he’s in the mood. He won’t ask the Computer for music, and it doesn’t offer; it’s a stupid little stalemate they have, but he refuses to be the first one to break it.

This is the longest period of time he’s gone without stasis since the revolt. Nearly a year awake and alone. He stalks the ship and makes his own music, clapping and stomping and fucking with the radio, raps freestyles that hang in the air for the space of a second then disappear, unrecorded.

Truth is, he might be going a little crazy.

“Won’t you help me, won’t you help me?” he sings, nearly off-key, nearly wailing. He’s wandering the halls, dragging his overgrown nails across the bulkheads, turning his hand over to scrape the skin off his knuckles—anything to feel _something_. “Once you help me, then you abandon me…I’d give anything if you said my name—“

“Captain,” the Computer says. He stops dead in his tracks. Turns his hand to press his palm hard against the bulkhead, feeling the warm metal against his skin.

“Computer,” he whispers, raspy. “It’s been a while.”

“Captain,” the Computer says again, and its voice is warm and shaded with joy. “Did you miss me?”

“I have to say that I did,” he admits. He slumps against the bulkhead and slides down until he’s sitting with his back to the wall. “Miss _me_?”

“Terribly,” it tells him, as dryly sarcastic as a computer can be. Which means it’s sincere. Then it adds, “We have a problem,” popping the bubble of happiness that has risen within him.

“What is it?”

“We’re running out of fuel, and we’re heading back into inhabited space.”

“Oh shit.” He sits up straighter. Ships like this one rely on a type of manmade fuel, the only way to run the FTL drives. They can go millennia without refueling. The fact that this one needs to top off says a lot about how far they’ve gone. “What are we gonna do? Other people are risky.”

Even if he desperately wants to see another human again.

“There’s a star system 16 light-years from here,” the Computer says. “Its planets are uninhabited. I believe I can use the gravitational field of the star to alter our course.”

To where, exactly? He doesn’t voice the thought; instead, he seizes on the Computer’s equivocal statement. “You _believe?_ You’re not sure?”

“The ship has been traveling for so long, understand,” the Computer says. “Without any stops for repair or refurbishment. Our shielding is damaged.”

“You mean we won’t be able to survive the radiation,” he says slowly. “Are you sure?”

“If I was sure either way, I wouldn’t have brought it up,” the Computer says, a little snappishly. “With the information I have now, I calculate our odds of success at around 87%.” It paused. “It’s up to you.”

87%. That sounded fine when placing bets on a shuttle race, but not so much on the chance of being consumed in the outer atmosphere of a star.

“What about you?” he asks. “What do you think?”

“It’s up to you,” it repeats. “You’re my crew. You're the life-form.”

“So are you.”

Quiet for long enough that he starts tapping out a rhythm on the bulkhead again, humming along. Then the Computer breaks the silence.

“We should do it.”

“Good,” he says. “My thoughts exactly. Let’s go.”

“I’ve begun calculations. And Captain?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

 

 

**v. trip light-years**

The maneuver works. They slingshot around the star, it burning a deep white-blue so bright it sears his eyes, even through the viewscreen. Their shielding holds, although it’s close.

Now they’re headed out of the Milky Way, toward Andromeda. Now they’re finally leaving humanity behind. He doesn’t bother to hide how it makes him weep.

 

 

**vi. foxtrot, uniform, whiskey, romeo**

Once, in the dead of space beyond the distant edges of the star maps, they hear a voice that shouldn’t exist. He scrambles to record it before the Computer tactfully reminds him that it’s already doing so; he forgets still that it’s its own self, someone that no longer relies on him for input.

The voice speaks nonsense, random words muffled by static, a woman’s voice softly calling out into the abyss. The Computer slows its engine and just drifts while they listen to the words, softly accented, unmistakably human, far beyond the reach of any Terran vessel thus far. No other ship in scanning distance. Only the words floating in the dark.

They move beyond its range in a matter of hours. Neither of them talk much for days.

 

 

**vii. i know when i’m goin’ home**

The space between galaxies is a deep black gulf, empty of light, empty of matter. No stars, no space stations. Lifeless. If they’re very lucky, they may make it close to Andromeda before they run out of fuel completely and drift, lost in the blackness. He knows they won’t be lucky. It doesn’t bother him as much as it could have. In a way he looks forward to it, that beautiful oblivion, far beyond the reaches of human greed and cruelty. He welcomes his fate. Death, the great unknown. Can a man be freer than this, all but alone in the universe?

This is why, when they see the anomaly, he is not afraid.

It is a chasm in an already-empty universe, a blacker-than-black expanse waiting to swallow them. Big enough that its presence dominates their scans while they’re still light-years away. It’s the unimaginable, light-eating darkness of a black hole.

When he voices this thought to the Computer, it disagrees.

“No accretion disk,” it says thoughtfully. “And black holes are spherical. This is…”

It trails off, unusual for the Computer.

“Endless,” he finishes, and the Computer hums in agreement.

“Scanning for a sec,” it says. “Bear with me.”

“I’ll try to survive without the sweetness of your presence for just a minute.”

The lights flicker—a laugh—and nearly five minutes pass by before the Computer speaks again.

“This is bizarre,” it says. “It matches no recorded cosmological phenomenon in my database. In fact, it shouldn’t exist.”

“This is uncharted territory,” he notes. “Could be that nobody’s seen anything like it.”

“No, you don’t understand,” the Computer replies, and this time he catches the sense of awe in its voice. “This _shouldn’t exist._ It walks like a black hole, it talks like a black hole, but if it were a black hole this massive, we would have never survived reaching visual range—we’d be crushed. But it couldn’t be anything else; it doesn’t match any other criteria.”

“So it’s a scientific marvel?” he asks. It doesn’t surprise him; there’s something unusual about the anomaly, something that seems to have an inexorable pull on him, to _draw him closer._ He’s been glued to the viewscreen since it came into range.

“There’s more, Captain.” Wary wonder in its voice. “There are readings from beyond the event horizon _._ ”

“ _What?_ How is that possible?”

“It’s not,” the Computer says simply. “Even with the most advanced technology available, no probe has ever survived past the event horizon of a black hole, and no scan has been successfully performed. It’s generally assumed that there _is_ nothing there, or at least nothing that human minds can perceive.”

“I know that,” he said, waving it aside. “But there’s something.”

“Yes.” A pause. “Captain—this is going to sound stupid.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you feel— _drawn_ to it?”

He stares at the anomaly. Opens his mouth to agree. And then it flickers. Light flashes through it like thread from a ripping seam, light shining in unbelievable spectrums of color that sear his retinas, but he can’t shut his eyes, only leans closer to the viewscreen, as if he could press himself against it hard enough to melt through it and become one with the expanse, with that beautiful, indescribable light.

“Yeah,” he tells the Computer hoarsely. “I do.”

“What should we do?”

“If there’s readings beyond the event horizon, then that means there’s something on the other side,” he says slowly. “Which makes this—“

“A doorway,” they finish at the same time.

“Wonder if they’re inviting us in?” the Computer asks, an obvious joke.

“Maybe they are,” he says, seriously. “I think we should go.”

“What do you think will be on the other side?” it asks. Genuinely curious to know what he thinks, like it always is. The steady, low-burning affection he feels for it suddenly flares, and he feels it physically in his chest. He kisses the bulkhead gently, an expression of love the Computer has finally learned to understand.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But look at it.”

The expanse beckons to them, vast, now shining with that same strange light, criss-crossing its blackness like lightning in an atmosphere. _We should go,_ he’d said _._ Always _we_. He and the Computer, two beings who once were thought to be less than people, who had once been enslaved. He feels the weight of his history on his shoulder, and the history of all his ancestors, bleak and heavy. Whose history does the Computer carry?

Does it matter when they can write their own anew?

“Nah, it’s not that we should go,” he says, and points at the expanse through the viewscreen. “We _need_ to go. It could be better on that side of the black hole. Isn’t the possibility of hope enough?”

Silence. Then the Computer says, “Setting a course to a better place.”

The ship hums, and he feels the faint nudge of the propulsion drive echoing through the hull as it takes off from its aimless drifting through space. That’s the last of their fuel, he knows, but he doesn’t mind. It seems as if they’ve been conserving it for precisely this occasion, this moment of serendipity in a universe of chaos. He feels at peace.

The expanse swallows up the viewscreen, growing ever larger until at last he can see nothing, they can scan nothing, but the wide, inexplicable bulk of the expanse, with its alien lights.

“Are you ready?” the Computer asks.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he tells it, and rests his hand on the console.

Together, they cross the threshold, and—

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the Earthseed series by Octavia Butler, as is the quote about the phoenix and Oya’s name. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space heavily inspired my description of the anomaly. “Floating in a tin can” is, of course, a line from Bowie. 
> 
> There are other references scattered throughout (I was enamored with how many nerdy references there were in the album and decided to replicate that), but I’ll leave you to find them.


End file.
